Review: TUNA, VAULT Festival

In a small village, a girl is on her last police warning. One more offence and she's going to be locked up. Her life is spent between school and a job in a shop while she takes care about her ailing mum and 6-year-old sister. Her future is a hazy dream she's afraid to consider and her house is scattered with guns.

Rosanna Suppa writes and performs a touching black comedy that displays the bleak reality of disadvantaged backgrounds. Directed by Robbie Taylor Hunt, she is exuberant and piercing as she lets her audience in slowly. While her character doesn't open up straight away, she feeds hints about her situation, leaving it to the crowd to put the puzzle together until she's ready to reveal it herself.

A natural-born entertainer, she paints a picture of masculinity and gun-related accidents with such lightness and impertinence that make it unimaginable not to like her. While the scenarios she describes are grim and horrifying, her narration is nothing less than thoroughly captivating. Her gloomy humour conceals the years of abuse in a household held hostage by an array of firearms and a spiteful father.

Her duties and devotion to her little sister combined with a system that's against her from the beginning stifle her dreams of leaving for university to get an education, and an alienating structure impairs any thought of change. She tears the subject apart from the inside, showing the shortcomings of a failing framework that binds her to their misfortune.

Suppa's writing highlights a vicious circle that's impossible to escape. Tuna might be arresting in its approach, but it's far from being so for the sake of shock value, which is its strength. The character's refusal to ask for help or even concede that she needs it mirrors the intentions of the piece: it doesn't beg for any empathy to be handed to her out of charity, but requests the public to give pause and acknowledge the issue bluntly.